The Healthy Schools Recognition Program is a self-directed, step-based program that promotes strengthening new and existing school-based health initiatives that can influence student belonging, school connectedness, and health and well-being.
The program guides schools through a 4-Step Healthy Schools Process that, when completed, can support meaningful, sustainable change and improved health-related outcomes for the school community. It also encourages meaningful collaboration to promote a holistic, whole-community approach.
The Healthy Schools Recognition Program empowers schools with flexibility and ownership by providing tools, tips, and prompts that support the development of a personalized Healthy Schools journey.
We’re celebrating the work of Healthy Schools across Canada, showing you how teams are putting the Recognition Program into action to support well-being in their communities.
Thornlea Secondary School in Markham, Ontario has been strengthening engagement, deepening community partnerships, and bringing well-being initiatives to life across the school through collaboration and student leadership.
Here’s what the Thornlea Healthy Schools Team shared about their journey.
Building a Culture of Well-Being
Being part of the Healthy Schools Recognition Program encourages students and staff alike to think about overall well-being and opportunities for including this in their programming. We have definitely brought more awareness to health and well-being, both in staff and students. We are seeing widespread support from staff for our monthly Wellness Wednesdays. The school has “wellness on the walls” through posters from School Mental Health Ontario, and we share wellness content through our social media.
Navigating Challenges
The current climate around administrative pieces that are required for each initiative has become a challenge. The amount of work required to do things that were once simple (like allowing student volunteers to miss class, approving vendors, or sharing student photos for promotion of healthy schools) have become paperwork heavy on staff, taking away from the time available to support the actual delivery of initiatives.
Also, we grew so much this year and it was hard to manage all of our club members! We found that the size of the student team diluted the quality of our meetings and the contributions of students.
Strengthening Community
The connections we've made with our Public Health team and other community organizations have allowed the sharing of a lot of resources (both for us and for teachers in health education). We are very proud of the community we've created around wellness; our student ambassadors are a welcoming group that promote inclusion and the building of confidence. We celebrate this great community from time to time at our meetings by running Internal Wellness Club Activities. Rather than our student ambassadors running an activity for the larger student body, we have an activity just for the wellness club in some of our meetings, like wellness jeopardy paired with hot chocolate.
Do you have a Healthy Schools initiative you want to share with us? You could be our next featured school! Tag us on social media (@opheacanada) or contact us directly at [email protected] to share your school’s journey.